A SUPER DUPER late weeknote, well I do have my rote memorized reasons ready, here we go: I was on a trip this long weekend to Sakleshpur, Udupi and Mangalore. What a time, it was so good that I forgot my phone even existed, truly healed! Detailed experience in a blog post entry hitting your reader soon ™️ :). I had a childhood friend over, who I did the trip with! I was still busy entertaining him for the rest of the week too 🐒. And some important personal work which kept me occupied till…

For many years, since I was a teenager, I have worked out at the gym. My goal was to gain weight and get stronger. I’ve managed to develop a good frame, and I’m functionally strong enough, but for the most part I haven’t gained the weight I’ve wanted to. A physical trainer once gave me this reality check, telling me I should’ve seen more results with that many years of working out. I would benefit from enlisting a trainer’s help. It was part of a sales pitch, but it was the first time I…

That feeling when you submit your visa renewal application and realise you forgot to attach one document.

> Omarchy is a fascist project that normalizes fascist thinking for everyone entering that community (even unknowingly). The baseline has to be not to use that system. And as people who believe in human rights and dignity, in community and a tech world that can be better we need to oppose Omarchy. Need to make sure it gets no seat at any table. Support projects who actively refuse to collaborate. Support projects who care about human rights and flourishing. And do not do business with the…

Who are you?I’m Tim Flood, a retired tech professional turned creative writer (which, of course, means I’m not retired at all). I live with my wife, Sandy, on the San Francisco Peninsula where I’m active in the SF-Peninsula branch of the California Writers Club.What do you write?A family challenge inspired my initial foray into professional writing. In 1999, I wrote Islands Apart, a non-fiction book to help families cope with their drug-using and drug-addicted teens. I learned that I could…

A classic string map appears in Inside No. 9 s07e03 (BBC Two, 2022). ▲ Inside No. 9 s07e03 (BBC Two, 2022) ▲ Inside No. 9 s07e03 (BBC Two, 2022) ▲ Inside No. 9 s07e03 (BBC Two, 2022) ▲ Inside No. 9 s07e03 (BBC Two, 2022) ▲ Inside No. 9 s07e03 (BBC Two, 2022) ▲ Inside No. 9 s07e03 (BBC Two, 2022)

Before I had the Year of Art, I had the Year of Friendship. It was actually two years, but who’s counting. These yearly themes aren’t really supposed to end when the year does. Something always sticks. One of the things that stuck from the Year of Friendship is that I now tend to say yes when someone asks me to do something. Relationships are the most important thing in life, and I don’t want to look back one day and think I should have done more, tried more, or spent more time with the people…

Kou (Cordia subcordata) is a canoe plant, brought to Hawaii by early Polynesian settlers. This is the caterpillar of the Kou Leafworm Moth (Ethmia nigroapicella), which feeds on Kou leaves and is doing a thorough job by the look of it.

This week was a very cartographical week. I found so many posts about maps. In an age when we interact with maps via our phones, car screens and such, that actually creating maps seems novel and a little subversive. Maps: Learning by Drawing (via Austin Kleon) Mapping Tariffs explores “the potential impacts of tariffs o… (via Kottke.org) Mapsnap is a program designed to take old Sanborn insurance … (via Kottke.org) Recent Maps (via Liz Steel) Pens: Beyond the 849: Exploring Caran d’Ache’s Haute…

I’ve created and released a pack of lowpoly, 3D models based on real-life stationary items!

Around the workshop We launched the Wonder of the Word “Hub” page last week. It will serve as the jumping off point to different podcasts and different resources to study through the Bible in 2027 and 2028. Wonder of the Word templates – We launched the first phase of the new templates on Thursday. The “Hub” page serves as the central jumping off point to the various parts of Wonder of the Word happening during 2027 and 2028. Right now the Hub page is a preview of what is to come. The launch on…

It's been a while since I talked about public art, but since it's an important topic about what makes cities both distinct and livable, I wanted to revisit it: but this time with an emphasis not on big elaborate set-pieces, but on the smaller touches that can make a city beautiful.1. IdiosyncrasyI love little pieces that make the city seem like it has a personality:This piece in the Montréal subway isn't huge; it's easy to miss. But when you notice it, it makes that station stand out a little…

In 2004 I wrapped up a web project in Lander, Wyoming, said goodbye to friends made along the way, and swore I’d come back. (The web project was for the National Outdoor Leadership School, aka NOLS — here’s an archive link of that work.) I made good on that promise 22 years later on this first leg of a Western Adventure to explore National Parks. Day one: We flew into Montana and hit the road for a six-hour drive to Lander. Drove through the Wind River Canyon at golden hour and arrived at our…

Appearance plays a key role in how people perceive you. How seriously they take you. And how much respect they extend to you. It shouldn’t be the case, but it is. We are all biologically wired to judge a book by its cover because the cover is the first data point we receive, and our minds want to make a decision as quickly as possible. But there’s more to it than just quick judgment or stereotyping. A person who pays attention to his hygiene and grooming habits can generally be trusted with…

It's over. On Tuesday, Paramount closed its $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery.The first post in this series was called "The Streaming Wars Just Got Boring." Hold that thought.Last time I checked in, the deal was in a deep freeze. A judge then put a March trial on the calendar. It never got there.Tuesday: It ClosedThe deal closed October 6, after Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan denied a last-minute petition from four Paramount customers asking to halt it. She didn't explain. The…

John Wyver writes: My schedule is all over the place, disrupted by family issues and other commitments. But here is a collection of interesting articles and more that I might have contributed last Sunday, and which I hope will get me back to posting more regularly. My somewhat seasonal and socialist realist image is ‘Grain for the State’, 1953, by Viktor Karrus, seen recently in the collection of KUMU Art Museum in Tallinn. • Anthologized: the world of W. Somerset Maugham on-screen: for…

Jim O'Rourke - Empty Bottle, Chicago, Illinois, August 27, 1999Amidst the heads and young guitar slingers in attendance at that 1996 CBGB John Fahey show we listened to yesterday — none other than Jim O'Rourke! Jim, of course, collaborated with Fahey on Womblife, and would go on to make some excellent Fahey-influenced music all on his own. And speaking of all on his own, a very nice summer of 1999 Aadam Jacobs tape of O'Rourke playing solo acoustic recently made its way onto the Archive. (What…

Yesterday, my plans put me near an Apple Store so I used this as an opportunity to get my iPhone 15’s battery replaced. I had been putting the AppleCare+-covered replacement off for awhile as I live in the no-man’s-land of a “smedium-sized” city that is about 2 hours from 3 different Apple Stores and didn’t want to make a separate trip. The installation went off without a hitch and was actually much quicker than models in the past due to the iPhone 15 continuing the iPhone 14’s midframe design.…

Storygaming on the OSR discord server!! A Troubleshooters scenario by MTB, GMed by the inimitable Hawkeyes. Cast: Otto Van Racecar, a Romanian rally driver with a gun, a modified 1958 Plymouth Roadrunner, and a wad of cash. Played by me Harry Fitzroy, a British intrepid explorer with a bunch of hiking gear. Played by Bubblegum Lord Kempton, a British lawyer/doctor with a sword cane. Played by MTB Marcel Mercredi, a 16 year old Swiss diplomat and womanizer. Played by Spuk Eloise Giraud, a…

This was fun, and liable to change. my9games.net/en 🕹️

The Buildings of England: Essex by Nikolaus Pevsner was first published by Penguin in 1954. A second edition, written by Enid Radcliffe, was published in 1965. Below there is the text relating to Witham from the second edition, but first I’ll give some information about Nikolaus Pevsner (1902 to 1983). He was born in Leipzig, Germany, where he eventually became a University lecturer specialising in the history of European art and architecture. He developed an interest in English as well as…

I have always loved being on vacation but always hated going on vacation, the days leading up to it, the getting there. Currently sitting in the waiting area of BWI, I board a flight to Detroit in an hour and a half, I hate this, the waiting, the boarding, the assholes who refuse to put their luggage into baggage arguing with flight attendants who tell them they can't put all their shit in the overheads, the coughers who won't wear masks - why would anyone anytime get on a tube of recycling air…

The plan was boring on purpose: a FreeBSD desktop VM on my Proxmox cluster, KDE Plasma, reachable remotely, so I have a FreeBSD workstation I can open from any machine. Something to live in, not something to admire. Then I wanted Claude Code on it. Claude Code ships no FreeBSD binary. It does ship a Linux binary, and FreeBSD has been running Linux binaries through the Linuxulator for decades. I had already done that for a Factorio server, so how hard could an AI coding agent be? Not very hard,…

How it started: you ever get to your mid fourties and have your eyesight drop off a friggin cliff— Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier.net) 2026-08-01T22:55:16.944Z How it’s going: This is my prescription: I think it means nearsightedness. I’m mostly fine with close-up objects (like my phone/computer), but things 10+ feet away are blurry. The glasses help! Nice for driving and being inside large buildings. While my vision was getting worse, I honestly thought I just had watery eyes a lot, and that…

Here we are, a week into extended September and Relay's annual fundraiser has come to a close with over $750k raised — and nearly $9k of that came from mine and Adam's campaign. This is short of our goal of $15k that I set without really thinking much about it and it is lower than previous years. A couple of people reached out privately to apologise that they couldn't donate this year — it's rough out there. I haven't donated as much as previous years either for various reasons but to raise…

Scribed by Sandre the Giant Released: 8th August 2006 Agalloch are a band who I can honestly say completely changed my outlook on just what metal music could be in 2006, when I first heard their incredible ‘Ashes Against the Grain’ album. Their name apparently came from the resinous wood of the agarwood tree, when frontman John Haughm found it while looking for a word that invoked ‘the aesthetic of woodsmoke on a winter’s night’. If there was ever a band whose sound encapsulated their name more…

We just closed our annual St. Jude campaign and raised an amazing amount of money. Together, the Relay community donated $756,200.97 to assist St. Jude in understanding, treating, and defeating childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases. That means that since 2019, the community has given just shy of $5.6 million for this noble cause. That number truly leaves me speechless. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you. Your donations mean that more families will have more tomorrows with…

So I think a few of us got punked by Nongshim. Why do I say this? Well, the US Nongshim came out with two ranges of the KPDH – one that had three different flavors and one that had three different images on the packaging. I ordered three on Walmart’s website – and got three Shin Ramyun regular style. So here’s that. I’ve got all three versions of the Zoey cup – the Korean local version, the US Shin version, and the US ‘burger hero’ version. Confusing, isn’t it? Well, here’s the regular Mira.…

Yesterday I was looking at the ticket cost and regularity of service of the ex-Thalys, now Eurostar, Bruxelles - Paris service.In terms of the speed of the service and the quality of the infrastructure, this route is excellent - more than 90% of the trip is on high speed lines where 300km/h is possible, and the line is 100% electrified.But the problem is how often the trains go (not often enough), their capacity (many single rather than double units), and as a result the high cost of taking…

2002 Randy Linden Platform: Nintendo Game Boy Advance Quake Advance is an impressive proof-of-concept created by veteran programmer Randy Linden, exploring the possibility of bringing id Software’s classic Quake to the humble Game Boy Advance. Randy was certainly no stranger to squeezing first-person shooters onto unlikely hardware, having previously been responsible for the remarkable Super Nintendo conversion of Doom. For the Game Boy Advance, he went a step further and created his own engine…